The US’s largest Muslim civil liberties and advocacy organization is calling for hate crime charges to be filed against a Texas woman accused of trying to drown a three-year-old Palestinian-American girl while saying that the child’s mother wasn’t really American.
For now, the suspect in the case has been booked on counts of attempted murder and injury to a child.
The case dates back to 19 May, when police in Euless, Texas, were called to an apartment complex swimming pool where there had been reports of a disturbance between two women, according to the local NBC affiliate.
Witnesses told police “a woman who was very intoxicated had tried to drown a child and argued with the child’s mother”, said a police news release reviewed by CNN.
The child’s mother told police that the alleged attacker – since identified as 42-year-old Elizabeth Wolf – questioned where she was from and whether the two children playing in the pool were hers, police said. Wolf also made statements about the mother not being an American, police added.
In a news release on Friday, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair) said the child’s mother wore a hijab and modest swimwear, and she was watching her children play in the shallow end of the pool when Wolf approached her.
“The alleged attacker reportedly approached the mother with racist interrogations then jumped into the swimming pool and grabbed the children to the deep end of the pool to allegedly drown them,” the statement said, adding that the mother’s six-year-old son was able to escape but her three-year-old daughter was unable to do the same.
“The alleged attacker snatched off the mother’s head scarf and used it to beat the mother as well as kicking her to keep her away while forcing her daughter’s head underwater,” Cair’s statement said.
A bystander helped rescue the three-year-old, Cair said, with the police news release adding that the child “had been yelling for help and was coughing up water”.
According to Cair, after police were called out and an officer arrested Wolf, she allegedly yelled to another bystander who was comforting the mother: “Tell her I will kill her and I will kill her whole family.”
Wolf has since reportedly made $40,000 bail to be released from jail pending the resolution of her case.
In a statement released through Cair, the mother – identified only as Mrs H – said: “We are American citizens, originally from Palestine, and I don’t know where to go to feel safe with my kids.
“My country is facing a war, and we are facing that hate here. My daughter is traumatized; whenever I open the apartment door, she runs away and hides, telling me she is afraid the lady will come and immerse her head in the water again.”
She continued: “Also, my husband’s employment is jeopardized, due to having to leave work to accompany me and our four kids whenever we have appointments and errands to run.”
The case against Wolf has triggered outrage from American Islamic community members, especially as anti-Muslim and Arab sentiments have grown across the US amid Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza.
Since Hamas’s 7 October attacks killed 1,200 Israelis and took hostages, Israeli military strikes have killed more than 37,500 Palestinians while leaving nearly 2 million survivors forcibly displaced across Gaza amid severe shortages in food, water, medical supplies and fuel as a result of Israeli aid restrictions, according to officials.
“We are seeing a new level of bigotry here where a person deeply believes they get to decide, based on religion, spoken language, and country of origin, whose kids deserve to stay alive and whose don’t,” Cair’s Austin, Texas, operations manager, Shaimaa Zayan, said.
Zayan added: “We ask for a hate-crime probe, a higher bail bond, and an open conversation with officials to address this alarming increase in Islamophobia, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian sentiment.”
The Texas state representative Salman Bhojani echoed similar sentiments, saying: “I’m shocked and appalled by this alleged racist, Islamophobic occurrence that took place in my town. Hate has no place in Euless … or anywhere in our great state.”
In some respects, the case called to mind that of Wadea Al-Fayoume, a six-year-old Muslim boy who was stabbed and killed while his mother was seriously wounded in an attack in their apartment in Illinois just days after Israel launched its war on Gaza.
The boy’s family’s landlord, identified as 71-year-old Joseph Czuba, was later charged with murder and a hate crime.
Advocacy groups have reported an uptick in both antisemitism and Islamophobia since 7 October.
With respect to the latter of those categories, Cair reported in January that it received 3,578 complaints of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim incidents in the last three months of 2023, marking a 178% increase over a similar period in the previous year.
